On the night of January 28, 2018, Carl R. Bowie Jr., a 52-year-old man, was caught in a burst of gunfire that rippled across Anchorage's Spenard neighborhood. Calls first poured in around 8:15 p.m. from the area of 36th Avenue and Arctic Boulevard; while officers were driving toward that scene, more frantic reports came from the 3400 block of Spenard Road.
Inside a mobile home at the Penguin Trailer Court—just off Spenard near 36th—police found the 52-year-old man dead from gunshot wounds, as witnesses described people scattering into the winter night. In the days that followed, authorities publicly identified the victim as Carl Bowie Jr., age 52.
Through the summer of 2018, detectives homed in on a young suspect already sitting in the Anchorage Jail on an unrelated matter. They identified 18-year-old Austin Cottrell and added charges of second-degree murder, kidnapping, and second-degree robbery in the killing of the 52-year-old man. The investigation then widened. In September, police named a second suspect, 49-year-old Linda Richards. A month later, on October 19, 2018, U.S. marshals and Michigan officers found Richards hiding in a residence in Eastpointe, just outside Detroit. She was arrested and held at the Macomb County Jail while Anchorage detectives worked on extradition to Alaska—facing the same trio of charges tied to the January 28 homicide.
Years later, the case stirred again with a new development from a grand jury room. On February 28, 2022, a grand jury in Anchorage indicted 36-year-old Tristan Jamall Grant on charges including second-degree murder, robbery, and kidnapping, with prosecutors alleging he killed the 52-year-old man outside a residence in Spenard during the same January 2018 episode; at the time of the announcement, Grant was being held at the Anchorage Jail on $500,000 cash-performance bail and required a third-party custodian for release. Reports summarizing the indictment noted that two other people had already been arrested in 2018 in connection with the death of the 52-year-old man, underscoring the multi-suspect nature of the investigation.
In obituaries and memorial pages that appeared in the wake of the shooting, details of the victim's life filtered through the shock—a birthdate in 1965, ties to West Anchorage High School, and family who marked the loss. Those remembrances fixed the man at 52 years old on the day he was killed, anchoring the human story beneath the case file's steady accumulation of arrests and charges.
